Jane Davidson, the Minister for Education and Lifelong Learning, says she has had enough of teaching-union claims about schools funding.

Jane Davidson, the Minister for Education and Lifelong Learning, says she has had enough of teaching-union claims about schools funding.

Here, she explains why

I USED to look forward to Easter as the time to celebrate the birth of new life, the weather getting warmer and seeing all the daffodils out in bloom - that was before I became Minister for Education.

Now Easter also means the annual round of teacher-unions conferences and the annual inaccuracies reported in the Press about funding for schools in Wales.

Once again I need to put the record straight.

In Wales local authorities take their own decisions about the level of funding they allocate to services such as schools taking into account the differing circumstances and demands. Some have higher costs because of transport, deprivation needs, high incidence of small schools and so on. The availability of resources for education is not just linked to Assembly funding but also to decisions taken by local authorities on council tax levels.

This year, councils in Wales are receiving a total of nearly #3.2bn to support front-line services. This 5.5% increase is almost double the rate of inflation. In addition to the #3.2bn, a wide range of special grants have also been allocated which provide substantial funding to address key areas of need such as carers, people with disabilities and school improvement.

While Wales and England may have different routes for channelling money into schools, I can assure you that schools in Wales are not being short-changed in comparison with their counterparts in England. Please look at the evidence.

The latest available comparison tables for 2003-04 were published for the Education and Lifelong Learning Committee meeting on March 17 and can be found at www.wales.gov.uk.

They show that budgeted expenditure on school services in Wales was #1,781.4m which breaks down to #3,668 per pupil. On a like-for-like basis the spend per pupil for England (excluding London) was #3,604.

Budgets will vary across local authorities in England as they do in Wales because needs vary from authority to authority and authorities make choices about levels of funding for schools in light of those needs. The key difference is that we do not give the funding direct to schools but use local authorities to respond to differing local needs.

If you look at the information published in March, per-pupil budgets are higher in Mid and South-East Wales than in neighbouring English authorities but lower in North-East Wales. It is not therefore the case that the funding grass is always greener across the other side of the border with England. For most of Wales, it is not.

I do recognise that there are continuing concerns about levels of school funding, in some authorities more than in others. That is one of the reasons why I insisted that all authorities should set up school budget forums. These became mandatory last December. Over time I believe that these will lead to more confident and more informed dialogue between local authorities and their schools and information to the Assembly Government will be informed and consistent across Wales.

The Assembly Government has been investing heavily in school buildings to address years of neglect. We have already made available #464m over the period 2000/01 to 2004/05.

One of the Assembly Government's top 10 commitments is to invest a further #560m to improve school buildings during the four-year term of this Assembly and maintain progress to our target of ensuring that by 2010 all school buildings will be fit for purpose in terms of delivery of the curriculum and of providing a base for a wider school role in serving the community.

The investment which has already been made is beginning to be apparent right across Wales but there is still a considerable way to go and a significant number of schools are still waiting for much needed work.

In Wales, we take a community approach to ICT provision in education - we have not funded some individual teachers in some subjects with personal lap-tops, but instead provided every school with electronic whiteboards supported by dedicated training and the development of whiteboard content through NGfL Cymru.

We have also supported the provision of ICT Learning Centres in school and community venues across Wales, providing a resource to support family and community learning activities as well as improving access to ICT to support teaching and learning right across the curriculum.

The results from our recent survey of ICT provision in schools shows that we have made tremendous improvements over the past five years and we are building on this now with the introduction of high-speed broadband services into schools.

Devolution gives us all the chance to learn from each other across the UK, but let's learn from each other based on facts and evidence rather than anecdote and inaccuracy.